


l’Incorruptible

by neilegni



Category: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt
Genre: Gen, Suicidal Ideation (canon), Yuletide 2018, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-27 10:26:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17160290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neilegni/pseuds/neilegni
Summary: Success for its own sake is a waste of time and effort, its glow fading as soon as the award is stashed with all the others and forgotten by all but the winner. Success only matters when it means someone else has been defeated.





	l’Incorruptible

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mtgat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mtgat/gifts).



> Although this prompt was already filled by a wonderful participant, the prompt was too good to pass up. Hope you enjoy this bonus gift!

She knows what happens to girls like her.

Girls who practice table setting and ankle crossing, who learn to nibble discretely at sandwiches that are designed to look better than they taste, eventually trade in their tea sets and tiaras and become Ladies who Lunch on the Upper West Side. They lead lives of no consequence; their conversations and gestures are empty and remain unchanged as the world spins ever on. It’s elegant in its simplicity. It’s tempting for a woman like Deirdre Robespierre, whose mind is more powerful than society wants it to be. Who is smart enough to know just how trapped she is, but not male enough to escape the oppression that is her birthright. Whether she is complicit or not, she knows what happens to girls born and bred like she was.

They become women like her mother and her sisters. They stream out of debutante balls and social halls saturating an already crowded market and driving demand down even lower. They are looked at, lauded, and loved until they aren’t. They are fucked and forgotten. They are replaced by newer and younger women who will also someday become too old for husbands who are already 25 years their junior, continuing the cycle until the Yuko fellatio update is out of beta testing. They bring children into the world so someone will need them. They host galas and raise funds as if it will grant them a legacy of sainthood. They are forced to scramble to keep up, and invent new ways to stay relevant and necessary. They are dispensable in a way Deirdre had vowed she would never become.

She will never be left. Instead, she will leave.

The gun in her hand is smooth and its cold weight rests heavily in her freshly manicured hands. For a moment she admires how feminine and delicate her pale pink nails look against the mother-of-pearl grips, her diamond catching the light streaming in through her penthouse’s picture windows. She toys with taking a picture to post on Instagram—it’s very aesthetic, but it’s not part of the plan. She knows who she wants to find her, and when, and how. But there is something delightfully macabre and apropos that quirks her lips into something like a smile when she considers how to word the caption as her suicide note. Would the other moms give up their seats on the PTA or co-op boards and follow her lead, trying to top a gunshot with a noose? Defenestration? No, those women would take the easy and painless way out. They’d swallow their children’s medication and be sure not to leave a mess. Even in death they would worry they’d be remembered as an inconvenience.

Not Deirdre. She hopes it takes days to scrub her blood off the walls. She hopes that just when they think they’ve removed every spatter of her from the marble tile or the cream shag carpet, they uncover another. Without their Lady Macbeth around, how will they ever out every damn spot? 

The last of three daughters, Deirdre was an “I told you so” baby.  
As in:  
“I told you I wanted a son.”  
“I told you that doctor was a quack.”  
“I told you I didn’t want more children.”  
“I told you this wouldn’t fix anything.”  
“I told you this was a terrible idea.”

Her very existence provided endless opportunities for her parents lob insults over cocktail glasses and scold each other the way they would have scolded their children, if they hadn’t outsourced the work of parenting to a battalion of domestic workers streaming in and out of their Westchester manse. She realized early on that her parents were much more interested in talking about her than they were in talking to her, which suited Deirdre just fine. They wouldn’t have understood what she had to say about botany and astronomy and philosophy, even if they were interested enough to inquire about what she was reading. She wrote poetry they would never see. She drew portraits of girls they would never know. She composed songs no one would ever hear. Her life was rich thanks in part to her solitude. If her parents had doted on her they way they had her sisters, her sketchbooks and journals and ideas would have been ripped away in favor of more appropriate pursuits. What a gift it was to have everything and answer to no one.

Of course there were the obligatory riding lessons and French lessons and rowing practice and summers spent at tennis camp—all the markers of a well adjusted wealthy young woman that never really held Deirdre’s interest beyond securing whatever trophy or ribbon she could win. Competition came to her naturally. She savored the opportunity to prove she was the best. But to whom? When her name was called, and it always was, she would proudly accept the award and scan the faces in the crowd. She knew her parents weren’t there, they never were, and their presence was irrelevant. She was looking for the family who looked most crestfallen. Undoubtedly theirs was the daughter whose hopes had been crushed by Deirdre’s win. This intoxicating feeling, not being the best, but rather being better than became all that mattered. Success for its own sake is a waste of time and effort, its glow fading as soon as the award is stashed with all the others and forgotten by all but the winner. Success only matters when it means someone else has been defeated. 

The top of a pyramid doesn’t float unsupported high above the ground, a coach once told her. It rests upon innumerable other bricks that will forever sit below, supporting the pinnacle while it benefits from the strength of the whole. There is no top without the base to support it. Idiot, Deirdre had thought. Then what distinguishes a pyramid from a crumbling tower of rock? There has to be one piece that is more worthy, propped up by the rest, and stretches higher to heaven, and will always be noticed. Incomparable. Irreplaceable. 

There was a girl. Isn’t there always?

There was a girl who taught Deirdre she had a heart and that it could be broken.

There were soft touches and secrets and laughter and the sweetest kisses she would ever know. There were conversations that would unspool over the course of hours, days, months. There were words that Deirdre would practice saying to herself first, building the courage to admit only in the dark. There were words that never needed to be said, only felt. There was openness and freedom and peace. There was finally feeling enough.

There was betrayal. Isn’t there always?

Lulled into a false sense of security and lured into vulnerability, Deirdre had met her match. Someone who had bottled up her happiest moments and turned them into something ugly and shameful, all for accolades and attention. From a distance, she could admire how cold and calculated the plan had been. She hadn’t suspected even a hint of insincerity. If it hadn’t been Deirdre’s own soul that was shattered, she could admit the brilliance and flawlessness of every element that led to her losing everything that mattered to her seventeen year old self. Distraught and distracted, Deirdre watched herself lose her piccolo solo and move to second chair in woodwinds section. She watched with the masses as the prom queen crown was placed on a head of blonde hair that had inspired sonnets written in the margins of her calculus notebook, that never turned her way again. Sleepless and starving in her grief, her legs shook posed atop the pyramid during cheer practice and she was quickly replaced. She kneeled on the grass humiliated and acutely aware whose weight she was supporting.

Never again, Deirdre promised, would she allow herself to be weak and distracted. Human frailty was a curse she could avoid as long as she remained steadfast and focused.

Girls like Deirdre turn off their hearts. What they truly want is never what they get. They get what they are told they want, or what they tell themselves they should want. The women around her are like children who are told they want roller skates for Christmas by parents who have already bought and wrapped roller skates that lie in wait under the tree. They are told they want the skates often enough that they not only believe they want the skates—they believe it was their desire from the start. It’s only when they take their skates out onto the sidewalk that they remember they hate roller skating, and actually wanted fishing gear. But by that point the gifts have been given and the receipts thrown away, and gratitude is the only acceptable response. How many women does Deirdre know who think they are happy because they have what they think they are supposed to want? Maybe this is easier than learning what you actually want and knowing it can never be. 

At Princeton, and later on at the State Department, she was praised for her sleepless nights. Her schedule was a thing of beauty with each minute accounted for and color coded, not a second wasted. She held socials and made important contacts. She wrote remarkable essays, and gamely followed directives to see her professors in their offices to review her work. Of course, upon knocking on their heavy cherrywood doors they could remember nothing of her work, but they always assured her with a hand on her thigh that she had “enormous potential”. She swallowed her pride and thought of her future; one where she was once again free to pursue her passions and fuck the rest.

She’s free now, so to speak. Free to pull the trigger whenever she wants. Free to end the pressure of being “too much” in a world that wants her to believe she will never be enough. Free to walk away from the soul sucking boredom she has come to learn is called “leisure”.

It turns out that the future she mapped for herself is incredibly dull. Without anything to spur her creativity she never writes a manuscript or composes a symphony or… 

Her life is all possibility, but in the absence of competition her drive diminishes. When she picks up a paintbrush or pencil she can’t help but wonder: who is it all for? She learns several years into her marriage that she doesn’t actually care about winning. In the absence of a career she makes a hobby out of picking fights with her husband, with the other playground moms, the sales clerks at Tory Birch and Neiman Marcus. Like an addict, she believes the win will fill the gaping emptiness she feels. In the throbbing silence that follows in the wake of her screams or the sound of hand slapping skin she can almost convince herself she's right. But the salve of stillness is temporary, and she needs another round to feel alive again.

As a naive child learning and creating for her own sake was more than enough. Now she knows that these idle pursuits are just the opening scenes of a story that ends with her inventing friends in the patterns of yellowing wallpaper alone in her bedroom.

Jacquline will find this out soon enough, Deirdre reasons. It’s all well and good to say you no longer care what people think until you open your eyes the next morning and realize there was nothing else holding you together. Exceeding or fighting their expectations is all that sparks the passionate fire she used to know. It won’t be long until Jacqueline comes crawling back. These declarations of independence never last. When there is no one else to impress in her lonely apartment and her lonely life with her horrible children and Mole Woman friend, she will collapse in on herself like a dying star. Just like Deirdre. 

But at least Deirdre will know she did it first.


End file.
